The Consequences of Our Underwhelming Criminal Justice Reform Debate

With criminal justice reform figuring prominently in the early stages of 2016 Presidential race, its national moment has undeniably arrived. And with it our country’s march—or rather grueling slog—toward a system of greater humanity is rightfully celebrated. After all, we stand at the brink of repairing an institution that violently mocks American rhetoric about justice and equality. Excitement naturally flows from the near reversal of a policy hellscape that’s claimed the lives of so many.

But if we’re honest with ourselves—an aversion we won’t examine too closely—we’ll see through the haze of triumphalism that, in pivotal ways, the debate itself remains a specimen of underwhelming political theatre.

By my count, the entire reform affair is warped in two grave and complementary ways that, if left unresolved, may sink the odds of transforming our nation’s most widely discredited institution. That is, as we revel in our moral courage, we’ve failed to fully apprehend the enormity of our moral failures.

The first blunder is a severe underestimation of the depths of the problem.

Pick the official, pundit or writer of your choice from the cast of players. Chances are they’ve taken center stage to unload an arsenal of numbers demonstrating both the shocking scale and unsustainability of American incarceration. And with good reason: the numbers are indeed staggering, easier to find than avoid, and perfectly useful for contextualizing the wickedness of our chosen path. But with astonishing consistency, we’ve underestimated the herculean effort that the numbers themselves make brutally obvious.

To take one example, our obsession with the more restrained system of the pre-Nixon years is particularly revealing. The official story, spun endlessly in the popular press, is that Nixon’s Drug War swept away an otherwise sensible tradition of correctional policy. Hearts heavy with nostalgia, a reversal of that ill-fated war now embodies all of our deepest aspirations for reform. It’s a comforting tale, but hopelessly bad history.

The myth of pre-Drug War sanity is little more than a cocktail of desperate nostalgia and willful ignorance. It’s true that the Drug War—racist as the day it was born—thrust us into an era of full-blown correctional barbarism. Yet its predecessor was no less a policy nightmare, boasting a still wildly disproportionate black-white incarceration ratio of 5:1. Fair-minded readers will note that that is decidedly better than the status quo, but returns us, at best, to an era of still senseless cruelty.

Equally important to understand is that the Drug War was not the first time bigotry and political opportunism joined forces to expand the carceral state. That alliance is, at least, a century older. The heavy-handed Black Codes of the post-Civil War South are only the most hideous example. The Drug War is its rightful heir. It is the planned and predictable consequence of our heritage enshrined in public policy, not its absence. Understanding this history—well-documented in Naomi Murakawa’s thoroughly-researched book, The First Civil Right:How Liberals Built Prison America—marks the distance between adopting a policy of actual fairness and a vulgar parody of one.

Which brings us to our second, and overlapping, blunder. Every adventure has its origin story and mass-incarceration is no exception. Just beneath the halo of our criminal justice reform heroics rests an ugly, immutable, truth about the authors of that very system’s devastation.

It must be swallowed that mass-incarceration, in all its gruesome detail, is democratic—championed by bloviating politicians, but carried out in our name and with our assent. Tough on crime was no accident. Few policy efforts have enjoyed such wide public support across the political spectrum. But in a feat of impressive intellectual jujitsu, we pretend we haven't the slightest clue where policy emanates from in the first place.

The stakes are not trivial. This is the difference between confronting a system imploding on itself and one achieving the highest aspirations of its architects.

And we’ve seen those aspirations taken to their gruesome conclusions. It’s Kalief Browder’storture at the hands of the same state sworn to protect him. It’s the preventable suffering of all the world’s Ashley Diamond’s in the face of lethally stupid policy. These are inevitable consequences to a policy of deliberate violence. And make no mistake, plundering someone’s body and threatening them with physical destruction if they resist is, by definition, violence. That is manifestly true. The unavoidable question one runs up against is “who did this to them?” I suspect our silence rests with the inescapable truth of that answer: we did.

Such is the inseparable union of national virtue and national sin. Owning the best and worst of your country’s heritage is the inextinguishable contract of democracy and it applies with haunting precision to the American carceral state.

It is, to my mind, a remarkably empowering notion. Because to recall that America’s ghastly criminal justice record was rendered by our own callous hands is to accept that it must be repaired by the same. Anything else seems a pathetic attempt to relieve oneself from the hard work of citizenship, the cost of which is paid in human carnage.